The Swimmer (1968) DVD9 and Blu-Ray Grindhouse Releasing

It's hard to imagine a more unlikely prospect for a film adaptation than John Cheever's short story, The Swimmer, which was first published in The New Yorker. The story of Ned Merrill, a middle-aged man in suburban Connecticut who appears to be suffering a major nervous breakdown, was not the type of story that was usually optioned by a Hollywood studio but it definitely appealed to director Frank Perry, an independent filmmaker who had previously received a Best Director Oscar nomination for the sensitive character study, David and Lisa (1962). With his wife Eleanor serving as the screenwriter and Burt Lancaster agreeing to play the title role, Perry was able to convince Columbia Pictures to finance The Swimmer (1968) despite their reservations about the unusual storyline: the Lancaster character finds himself several miles from home and decides to swim his way back, using the backyard pools of numerous acquaintances along the way. With each new encounter, we get another piece of the puzzle, another detail about the identity of the confused protagonist and what might have brought him to his current mental state.